Apple Tech Talk 2011 - Berlin

As all iOS developers know tickets for this year conference were booked almost immediately. At first, I thought that the scale of the event will be much bigger (however doing it in 9 cities is not piece of cake – if it all will be as well organized as the one in Germany). I’ve counted about 350 seats in the room where the KickOff part took place – as usual, started with some statistics – which is very typical for Apple.

Lecture about iCloud was very instructive – presentation of the new API and a lot of source code. Another good thing to go to was the Performance HitList talk but on the other hand, if someone already uses ARC then in my opinion more deserving of going will be topic with AirPlay. Also if Storyboard and settings of project file are not a secret to you then I suggest going to the lecture about GameCenter.

As for the organization, everything was according to the agenda, catering was really solid – so no one should worry that he or she will be starving in between lectures. At the end, I think that everyone who did attend this conference had returned home full of positive impressions, new contacts and a t-shirt from Apple as well :)

What’s really important

What I really wanted to mention here is that this kind of events have a whole bunch of side stories and it is almost always super positive and actually putting extra effort and saying YES even if you are not really up to doing something pays off.

Here is a little story of what happened to me just before the event and how it affected next few years of my work life.

Trip to Berlin

I live in Warsaw so there were couple reasonable options to take into account but I choose to take a train. There was a nice direct connection and it took like 6 hours. A good thing about going by train is that you can get some work done. When I went to take my place there was already a person by my seat. The carriage was nearly empty so seems I was out of luck but on the contrary… You don’t know me but I am kind of person that has some trouble making the first contact - I am not a shy guy but this first touch has always been an issue for me. After 20 minutes or so, I noticed that my neighbor started watching some introduction tutorials for PHP programming. So that was my cue - I had something that I could relate to. After a while of talking it turned out that Radek is a Polish guy living currently in Canada and he is far from being a software developer - he majors in chemistry. Radek was part of a startup that was doing work in Berlin and he ended up traveling between Warsaw and Berlin to see family. When we arrived in Berlin we have parted our ways but stayed in touch. After few days I’ve gotten a text from Radek that he met some guy in Berlin and he ended up recommending me (as my programming services) to him. This guy was Alexander Börve, an MD running company called iDoc24 (rebranded then to First Derm) based in Sweden at the time.

The outcome

I did some work for Alex and just after few months, I started working full time on iDoc24. This turned out to be a 3-year adventure for me and it was all due to being open-minded to meeting other people and saying YES when it was easier just to handle my own business.

This post was updated on 5th Feb 2018